The last two mega-trends

In previous posts I looked at two of the four inexorable mega-trends Bernard Lietaer sees currently bearing down on us : 1) the aging of global population, and 2)a revolution in information technology. These two issues leave us with two questions: how are we going to care for the increased needs of aging populations, and how can we sustain ourselves if our labor is no longer needed by the corporations for the making of stuff? 

The final two giant converging trends  are
-3) climate change with loss of biodiversity, and
-4) instability of the global financial system.

3) As I write this, a UN conference on  biodiversity has just created something called the Nagoya Protocol. Representatives from 198 countries decided they would work to cut the current extinction rate by at least half by 2020. The goals include protecting 17 percent of the world’s land areas and 10 percent of its oceans. Scientists predict that the earth is losing animals and plants 100 to 1,000 times the historical average, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Also under the Nagoya Protocol, the U.N. conference delegates decided that rich and poor countries would share the benefits of resources like medicinal plants.

 The assumption that climate change and the mass extinction of species is a large and growing problem is a matter of widespread discussion. Some folk prefer to thing that humanity has nothing to do with causing it, while others grieve the whole thing has already gone so far that we are lost. No one is in favor of climate disaster, whether or not they think it is coming upon us.  Lietaer suggests  a useful "money" question in this area is "How do we resolve the conflict between the need for  long-term planning,  which would be necessary for projects in sustainable development, such as reforestation, and the short-term thinking which dominates our investment universe and forces even the most enlightened managers to focus on the next quarter's earnings?" 

4)The fourth mega-trend bearing down upon us was a shocking novelty to me. I had never given much thought to paying interest on loans (which I avoided) or earning interest (which I tried to do). However, our financial system  itself turns out to be inherently unstable and unsustainable, as well as a fairly recent invention of history. The past 25 years have witnessed a series of ever larger and more geographically extensive financial crises. This book was written before the economic melt-down of 2008.  The hubris of world capitalism was still unassailed- only  Latin Americans,  Russians,  southeast Asians, "others of all sorts" had  until then been affected. However, the events of 2008 engulfed even the U.S. and Europe.

Lietaer points out that the international flow of money has grown beyond the power of even America, the largest and most powerful of  national states,  to control. He asks how we individuals and small communities are ever to protect ourselves from such rampaging financial forces?

I like this book because it is encouraging. It seems to me that listening to the daily news could put one into a permanent hopeless gloom. Next time I will finish his first chapter with thoughts on creating a sustainable future- that is the subtitle of the book: "creating new wealth, work, and a wiser world"!